Sitting in Brussels, they have Westmalle Dubbel on tap. Drinking that with my friend. We are both facing the busy Grote Markt lit up with buzzing activity at night. We are taking up two of those tiny circular beer garden tables because we both wanted a view of the square. What American hogs.

My table is pretty crappy, it's wobbly, and the board strips that make up the circular shape are warped and bent. So, I have the beer balanced on two boards so it is level.

What I didn't anticipate was my foot, which bumped the table, sending my large mug of 1/3 full beer flying up and dumping all of the beer onto my lap.

Keep in mind this is my first beer so even I am surprised at my clumbsy actions.

I quickly regain composure, hold in the uproarious laughter, set my beer upright and hope no one else saw.

Then I look to my right, and a german man and his date are sitting there, smiling ear to ear. In his thick German accent he struggles to say "You are...".

He's thinking.

"Wet!"

He then mimed to me that I should wring out my jeans and suck the precious beer out. I almost did, but then I just ordered another one :-).

I transferred my beer to secondary on Saturday after only four days in the primary. Those yeast went crazy for the wheat! The SG reading at time of transfer was 1.013, so it's sitting at about 4.2%abv, currently. Also, the sample was quite pleasant to drink, even at this very green stage. I'm really looking forward to the final product.

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"I wish I had documented more…" said nobody on their death bed, ever.

No festival, per se, but I'm enjoying a BLue Moon now and have a couple of SN Torpedo Extra IPA in rapid chill. Just finished watching my oldest "compete" in his AP physics class cardboard boat race. His team took second! So now I'm enjoying a beer. Go figure. Cheers, y'all!

I bottled my beer last night and the process went very smoothly thanks to some techniques I picked up on homebrew boards. First, I sterilized my bottles by putting them in a non-preheated oven, bringing them up to 325°F, and leaving them in for two hours at that temp. They took about an hour to cool down enough to handle. During the cool-down time, I sanitized my equipment and boiled the priming solution. I attached a spring-tip bottle filler directly to the spigot of the bottling bucket with a short length of tubing.

I had my "filling station" set up so I could grab a bottle directly from the oven, lift it up to the bottle filler, fill it, and hand the bottle to my wife for her to pull a cap out of the sanitizing solution and set it on top of the bottle. We worked in batches of 12. Once 12 were filled, I'd cap them in the order they were filled (allowing time for CO2 building to displace any O2 in the headspace).

All in all, I filled 24 22oz bottles and 4 3/4 12oz bottles. They should be carbed up in just over a week.

The small amount left in the bottling bucket was pretty tasty, despite being totally flat. I can't wait to pop a cap on the finished product!

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"I wish I had documented more…" said nobody on their death bed, ever.